Measure Up?

Will ‘Megyn vs. Donald’ Measure Up?

She’s up to the challenge, but the odds aren’t with her.

By Jack Shafer

If you’re susceptible to media hype—and who among us isn’t?—you’re awaiting tomorrow’s interview of Donald Trump on Megyn Kelly’s new program Megyn Kelly Presents as a revival moment for the personality mega-interview, a form that has languished since Barbara Walters semi-retired from the business two years ago.

Fox obviously believes its own hype, promoting the program wall-to-wall on its own properties, and allowing the New York Times to profile the special, which debuts tomorrow night not in cableland’s Fox News Channel, but Fox’s regular entertainment network.

On paper, Kelly makes a good replacement for the underrated Walters, who can be said to have inherited the personality mega-interview concept from CBS News stalwart Edward R. Murrow, whose Person to Person program ran on his network from 1953 to 1961. Murrow paid conversational visits to movie stars (Brando, Bogart, Bacall, et al.) as well as politicians (John F. Kennedy and wife) and world leaders (Fidel Castro) in an easygoing style, helping to invent the infotainment genre. Given that the other three guests in Kelly’s debut are actors (Michael Douglas and Laverne Cox) and a prominent lawyer, Robert Shapiro, you could help but think Fox owes CBS and the Murrow estate a hat-tip for the concept if not royalties.

But will Kelly scintillate? I’m guessing not. Also guessing not is Fox News Channel reporter Howard Kurtz who, last month, deliberately tamped down expectations for the program in a column. One of the things that makes Kelly so good on her Fox News Channel program, The Kelly File, is her steely, real-time, and often non-Foxian grillings of her guests. The confrontational style she uses to such good effect will be replaced with pre-recorded and (presumably) edited sit-down interviews on her new show, starting with Trump.

It’s a shame, because if the show was live, we’d all be excited by the prospect of Kelly interrogating Trump about the Times story about his treatment of women, which broke after this interview was taped. Instead, we probably see an updated version of what Walters once did for ABC, tilted towards personality coverage and away from policy questions.

Kurtz all but predicted that Kelly’s interview with Trump will be soft news, but soft doesn’t have to be limp. There’s bound to be at least a modicum of payoff; given Trump and Kelly’s hostile history, the pair could read columns from the Manhattan phone book to one another and some sort of eyes-squinting confrontation would ensue. The interview will likely play on several levels: As a rematch of the first Republican presidential debate, in which Kelly excoriated Trump by reading back to him his foul views on women; as an effort to dial Kelly’s relationship with Trump back to a cooler level; as an gambit to elicit from Trump some newsworthy gaffe or confession; and maybe on all three levels at the same time.

Journalists delight in one-on-one interviews like with office holders and candidates like tomorrow’s Trump vs. Kelly contest because it fixes their status as equals with the candidates in a way that a “scrum” interview or a press conference Q&A rarely does. If edited by the interviewer instead of run verbatim, the interviewer can control the information flow and in effect “make” the news instead of merely “report” on it, to echo a point made by media scholar Michael Schudson in his 1982 book The Power of News. Like any media pro—and as an inheritor of the Walters infotainment tradition—Kelly will work all the advantages to make the interview hers, not Trump’s.

Whether she administers Trump’s beating with a rake or a feather duster, Kelly will aim for an interview that can be anthologized with TV’s other great political Q&As. David Frost’s 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon—for which Nixon was paid—probably stands at the top of the list of great interviews because Frost out-lawyered Nixon to get him to apologize for his White House sins. In 1980, Roger Mudd of CBS News helped scuttle Edward Kennedy’s presidential campaign of by asking the softball question, “Why do you want to be president,” to which the candidate responded with a mouthful of unconvincing mumblecore. Working down the list, we come to Steve Kroft’s 1992 60 Minute interview with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton about the reports of Bill’s affairs, which is distinguished not because anybody confessed but because Kroft pursued the topic with persistence. And it’s hard to beat Charlie Gibson’s gentle but absolute vivisection of the underprepared Sarah Palin for ABC News in 2008 for brilliance.

But when it comes to where this interview lands in the TV pantheon, one key element is out of Kelly’s control: the mindset of her audience. To an extent we don’t think about when we assign credit for great moments in TV news, it’s the audience that often determines whether a story lands with impact or not. To put it in Schudson‘s terms, an interview is a triadic affair: In addition to the interviewed and the interviewer stands the unseen public—us—who function as the “overhearing audience” both completes and complicates the communications triangle. David Frost, for example, had the benefit of knowing that most of the public regarded Richard Nixon a disgrace at the time of the interviews, and that help Frost close a spiral of guilt around his subject’s neck.

Kelly, on the other hand, enters a contested realm when it comes to Trump and American TV viewers. They have that history together, and he is almost equally loathed and loved by the public, which means she must be careful not to aggress against Trump in a way that gives him a chance to take wounding shots at her and her network. CBS News anchor Dan Rather had this misfortune befall him in 1988, when he interviewed Vice President George H.W. Bush live on television. Bush claimed had agreed to a general interview about the 1988 presidential campaign and was instead blindsided by questions about the Iran-contra scandal. Bush responded with hurt and anger at Rather’s questions, and won the day by making his interviewer sound unnecessarily prosecutorial and pettifogging.

If I can be so bold to retool a show that has yet to air, may I suggest that Roger Ailes, the founding genius behind Fox News Channel, put more faith in his talking head by running Megyn Kelly Presents as a live program? As Kelly demonstrates most nights, and as she proved on election night 2012 when she punctured Karl Rove’s fantasy Romney could still win in Ohio when she walked the cameras to the Fox “decision desk” for confirmation.

Why not call it Megyn Kelly Presents … Live?